Harris County
A rail yard and a sand pit, both inside a suburb
Three rows attach here and two of them are inside the place, which is unusual for a settlement of this kind. The rail yard, operated by Union Pacific, lies 1.69 miles from the centre; a sand and gravel plant lies 2.61 miles from it. A third row, a sorting operation, sits 3.5 miles out in Montgomery County.
A working rail yard and an active sand pit inside what is otherwise a residential suburb is a genuinely different arrangement from the pit-in-open-country pattern most of these pages describe.
What moves through the yard was not determined from any source read for this research. The sand is easier to reason about, because sand is heavy and low-value and therefore never travels far — the pit is where it is because the demand is.
So the haul is short, urban and constant, and it is hard on a truck
That combination produces the toughest duty cycle on any of these pages. Loaded aggregate moving a few miles through suburban Harris County traffic means constant stop-start under full weight, which is the worst case for a clutch, a gearbox and a set of brakes.
Add the queueing at the yard 1.69 miles the other way, and the hours run far ahead of the miles. A truck out of here with modest mileage has usually been worked hard, and the mileage is close to useless as a measure of it.
It also means the equipment turns over steadily rather than seasonally. Building work does not stop, so trucks come up for sale here throughout the year as jobs finish and operators re-equip.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those loads run under one statutory ceiling, and stone is conspicuously absent from the relief.
Texas sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb — the plain federal figures, with no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky grant.
What Texas grants instead is permits, and each is written for a named industry: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. There is no permit named for aggregate, stone, sand or quarry products. A stone hauler here gets the general permit and nothing else, while a ready-mix truck sits on the list — two trades a reader might treat as one, on opposite sides of the line.
The general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, and it carries a bond and liability for actual damage to load-restricted roads. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight is ten per cent less than the maximum, so the two percentages run in opposite directions and must never be added together.
Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight and the permit, the paperwork comes down to one sentence.
Everything after that sentence is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Both are ordinary and neither stops a sale.
One Texas rule is worth knowing because it runs further than any other state on file. Texas brands a truck salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds the actual cash value before the damage — effectively one hundred per cent, against eighty in Florida and sixty in Oklahoma. And it is a two-part test rather than pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The calculation also leaves out repainting and sales tax, which no other state on file excludes. For a truck whose damage is mostly cosmetic that moves the answer a long way.
Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.
What we buy here
All of that equipment is equipment we buy. End dumps and aggregate haulers off the sand work. Day cabs and road tractors off the yard runs, mixers, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Harris County is the deepest truck market in the country and this is the growing edge of it, so a seller 1.69 miles from a working yard is well placed.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Spring
- Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
- The hours are high and the miles are low.That is the normal shape of a short-haul aggregate truck in Harris County and it is not a problem. Tell us the hours.
- The bed is worn from sand.That is abrasion and it is expected on a truck working the pits 2.61 miles out. We’ll ask about the liner, the tailgate seal and the hoist pivot.
- What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
- Do you have to come out to look at it?Not necessarily. We can come to you and drive it away, come and tow it, buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you can drive it to us.
Why people call
Beyond a building contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived the job.
Yards between the Union Pacific tracks and the Harris County sand pits usually have one sitting.
Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.